Social history is a subfield of history. History probes happenings along with people. Hard Times: For These Times, better known as Hard Times was first published in 1854. It looks over English society and holds up to ridicule the social and economic circumstances of the time.

“Charles Tilly, one of the best known social historians, identifies the tasks of social history as: (1) documenting large structural changes (2) reconstructing the experiences of ordinary people in the course of those changes; and, (3) connecting the two” [1].

For a writer of fiction accompanied by a deep understanding of history-local, particular, cultural as well as social, the hard contentions of make-believe narrative in addition to historicity of experience become apparent. Supposing and so-to- speak, both history and imaginative writing branch off and come together simultaneously. The more measured their dissociation in the artistic taste, the more complete their closeness in historical denotations. It is readily apparent in Charles John Huffam Dickens’ Hard Times, on a higher or lower plane. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, including Steinbeck’s The Grapesof Wrath can also be summoned back here. 

History writing is a narrative fashion, mentioning not only via documents to events, but also via events to the forces of which they are ‘presumable utterance’. This narrative manner of explanation is customary to the novel besides history.

Hard Times is Dickens’ sole novel not to have scenes set in London. “Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian Industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based on 19^th–century Preston” [2].

Visibly, Hard Times can very likely be perceived as ‘controverting’ stuff into aesthetic structure in its typical experience of the times encased also concentrated not only in a plot immersing individuals, nonetheless almost in the enduring casuality of vegetation myth-sowing, reaping, garnering which has operated in the guise of a model of ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics without end since the devising of agriculture. Whether this structure can still conform to, assess and explain up-to-date history since the Industrial Revolution appears to be the fundamental dialectics betwixt historical experience and fictional structure in Hard Times. Unquestionably, the plot immersing the agriculture-cycles is really striking as well as genuine and when it is discerned not as an aesthetic structure alone but as an advance towards history, it flashes forward to the transformation of historiography in Spengler and Toynbee.

What Lukacs speaks of Walter Scott, the supposed father of the historical novel is valid for Hard Times. “He (Scott) lets his important figures grow out of the being of the age, he never explains the age from the position of its great representatives” [3].

Louisa, Sissy, Rachael together with Stephen grow out of the age whose modes and mores are embodied in Bounderby, Harthouse besides Mrs. Sparsit. They grow out to a sense of loneliness as well as detachment cropping up from their awareness and comprehension of the hard times.

Hard Times is a narrative which intensifies and enlarges the grasping of the upshots of events enacted by characters, in such a manner that the sequence of consequences holds out surpassing the plot into past and future too. There is nothing about Coketown that is distinctive; it ushers to a point in the present the whole historical process of transformation of places and brings people since the Industrial Revolution to a focal point, in relation to lived history, the immediate perception of this process in the illustrative works of Mill, Matthew Arnold and Carlyle. This is so more due to the historical profundity in which Dickens conjures up the novel than by merit of its ‘representative’ situations.

It is undeniably the awareness of penetration or of the meaning of history which is transmitted rather by the human narrative enclosed in a cyclical plot. The specific sort of historical narrative in mode then was the linear narrative. Despite of the apparent touch of the Victorian life and society in Hard Times, the counter-painting of fictional together with historical narrative on these two planes (linear and cyclical) centers on a thorough pattern in which context the novelist seems to co-exist with Blake on the one side and Forster, Lawrence, in company with Eliot on the other. Coketown is very identical to Blake’s chartered midnight streets; Rachael, Sissy and Stephen are in the vein of the harlot and chimney-sweeper. It is a world viewed once more in Forster, in Lawrence’s mining-township, in conjunction with Eliot’s ‘unreal city’. Furthermore, the counter point between sewing-reaping-garnering (embodying the idiom and culture of agriculture) and the urban hell of Coketown is very closely the counterpointing of culture against civilization. Social plus economic ‘growth’ in the novel is a flow towards anarchism, unstable deposit of wealth, persons such as Bounderby, Harthouse and Tom thriving like undergrowth throttling the fruitful plants. Placed side by side with this jungle of Coketown is the designed and fertile growth of the agricultural cycle which was man’s earliest finding of affinity. Man’s most sacred culture ascended out of his conception of modelled cycles of life in agriculture. The destitution and filth of Coketown arise from less of this recognition which picks out oddballs namely, Louisa, Rachael, Sissy and Stephen. Coketown is introduced in HardTimes representing man’s estrangement from a dehumanizing drudgery, the philosophy of earning wages of making money and the pointlessness of pursuits. The markedly human animal naturalness is what is caught sight of in the sincerity of Sissy, Rachael’s aptitude for love, Louisa’s sacrifice and, most importantly, in Sleary and his circus.

The split-up of the old agriculture community came to pass under the advancement of civilization. It could be that, both the sense of what is being lost and for what clear gains is the composite experience handed on by Hard Times in its series of events in Coketown mounted in the plot structure of sowing, reaping and garnering. The breadth of the old agriculture structure is the earth on which any culture cultivates, flowers and flourishes to the utmost.

The disintegration of this entirety or wholeness occurs simultaneously to the march of industrial cities into rural scenery, the town getting ahead of the countryside. The evils of industrialism began initially to be observed in England, essentially in terms of the onslaughts of industry upon the English landscape from the eighteenth century onwards. Romantic literature reveals an avid passion to keep the rural fancy lively, even as the city proceeded to stretch itself into the nucleus of civilization. This was much more than a reminiscence for the old countryside-although it features outstandingly even in Dickens. It was the commencing of a recognition of culture-civilization polarity that was to grow into a paramount affair in the twentieth century, Dickens and his Hard Times being considerably in the mainstream of the historical growth.

This literary exposure of the transforming landscape is an index into an extreme cultural mutation, whose external form is drift of social and-also economic history through the prevailing two centuries. We may recollect with a scrutinizing eye the little known facts related to the lunacy of a minor rural poet John Clare in the early nineteenth century. The illusion of dread that captivated him was the first growing ‘enclosure’ of the landscapes. Clare’s was a melody-both personal and historical, partaking the suffering of isolation, detachment and breakage. Moreover, culture prevailed and prospered in this process in the exquisite balance in the landscape of low-spirited time, patterns of wall, crops, hedge, wagon ways, small fields and the linking farmsteads as well as market towns, which we have got by heart from the nineteenth century novelists, poets, in addition to painters.

Industrialized townscape imprinted on the human psyche a numb pattern of uniformity including abstraction whose out-turn on the English rural landscape is a ratio of town-country connection when civilization overhauls culture. This is what accounts for Dickens’ wavering feelings of deprivation and nostalgia towards the countryside and all that it intends.

Coketown is the historical symbol of Dickens’ world which he noticed taking dominance, not only socially and economically but also morally.

What can better narrate the crack in Hard Times between those who exercise control over or try to dominate-Gradgrind, Bounderby, Mrs. Sparsit, Harthouse, Tom and those oppressed crushed by insufficiency and cankered by solitariness-Louisa, Rachael, Sissy and Stephen.

The hard angularity, narrowness, rigidity and authority of Gradgrind has been stressed upon. It might as simply describe the moral timber of Victorian positivism that Gradgrind expresses.

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts… This is the principle on which I bring up my own children and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir” [4].

The expanding tone and tempo of change obstructed any choice as the industrial landscape shrouded England and as development in science and technology, trade and transport fell out of step with any appropriate social or moral economy. Bounderby is best perceived coupled with this progress, soothed by his own suburban garden against the grubbiness his world gave rise to. He describes himself in his world as having got into it “like a maggot into a nut” [5].

The immediate relevance of Hard Times to history is eyed in the Victorian times and civilization. Everything here is matter-of-factness and completely representative even as it has the concreteness, variety and vitality of felt experience.

“Various hints in the novel make it clear that the novel’s setting is more or less contemporary with its composition” [6].

“There were great intellectual and spiritual disturbances both in society and within the individual. The literature of the period reflects the conflict between the advocates of the triumphant material prosperity of the country and those who felt it had been achieved by the exploitation of human beings at the expense of spiritual and aesthetic values. In theory, people of the period committed themselves on the whole to a hard-headed utilitarianism, yet most of the literature is idealistic and romantic” [7].

Hard Times, which is a contentious novel becomes involved in matters, for instance, education along with industrialization. It puts forward moral beliefs and fairness questioning the presiding theories of the age.

“Dickens’s purpose in Hard Times was to satirize the utilitarian philosophy that recognized only the value of human reason, neglecting not only what Dickens calls in the novel ‘fancy’ but also the values of the human heart.”8

Hard Times is a timeless novel with a universal appeal. Many parallel characters as well as situations can be noticed even in the present times. The characters are unforgettable.

“The past, writes poet Michael Donaghy ‘falls open anywhere’ and it’s important that, when it does, we recognize and understand it” [9].

The novelist seems to suggest that sympathy and comprehension should also not be overlooked, while taking care of one’s concerns.

“Iron machines, dull, polluting and monotonous; under their tyranny the will, desires and ambitions of humanity has been replaced by manufactured objects, statistics and industrial shapes and colors. But nature pushes through this cold society and that conflict fuels this story” [10].

Swami Vivekananda, the Indian devotional figurehead and reformer in the 19^th century who strived to merge Indian spirituality with Western material advancement asserted that in a conflict between the heart and the brain, heart must be followed.

“Throughout life we face constant inner struggles between the informing oppositions within ourselves and the judgments we make based on these factors. One of the greatest conflicts we are faced with, however lies in the disparity between nurturing of the head and nurturing of the heart” [11].

Consequently, we may conclude that it is to be uninformed of history not to see, as Coketown in Hard Times obliges us to view the process of violation of values, knocking down of culture, collapse of the fundamental values of life and-also an imbecile violence to the land in pursuit of progress. In its name as much as in its rapport with time as well as place, it is symbolic of the shape and size of things that were to come.

1. “Social History.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history.

2. “Hard Times (Novel).” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times (novel).

3. Lukacs, George. The Historical Novel. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962, pp. 40.

4. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York, Signet Classics, 1961, pp. 11.

5. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times, pp. 189.

6. “Discovering Dickens.” Stanford University, https://dickens.stanford.edu.

7. “About Hard Times.” CliffsNotes, https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/h/hard-times.

8. “Hard Times.” Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com.

9. “Why Social History Matters.” The Learning Age, https://thelearningage.wordpress.com.

10. Reinold, F. How It Cannot Be Real, but a Fiction? Amazing! Amazon Classics Edition, Revised in the United States, October 2019.

11. “The Gradgrind’s Wisdom of the Head and Heart in Hard Times by Charles Dickens.” Hard Times Literature Essay Samples, 2021.